How to Help Your Child with Bullying at School
How do we get our children to tap into the hard feelings of being impacted by behaviour that's consistently intrusive or aggressive in the school or kindy environment? If the pattern of behaviour hasn't been effectively dealt with, feelings that may have already been repressed and the child being impacted may feel unsafe to open up and share their experiences or seek the help they need. Ideally teachers and parents need to be equipped to help both and all children involved as early as possible. In this audio, I talk about how a parent might be able to address the issue with the teacher at school. Inviting the teacher, through your language, to work with you in figuring out how to help your child when conflicts arise during the school day. I also talk about how you can talk with your child at home and how you can help them process and resolve some of those pent-up feelings that can otherwise lead to more problems.
What is bullying and how to deal with it if your child has been exposed to bullying at school or elsewhere
Covered in this video:
In the first few minutes of this video, a village member Sarah asks about her children fighting at home. We recommend some resources for her to access. We then talk through dealing with the situation of one's child experiencing bullying in school. Genevieve does a lot of work with teachers who really benefit from adopting a more relationship-based, rather than behaviourist, approach. Tabitha works for the Peaceful Parent Institute and is also a tutor and home ed mum. Tabitha shares her experiences as a teacher including special education teacher and the vice-principal of the local primary school in Palmerston North. Tabitha shares that what she has seen to be the most effective approach in addressing the more disruptive behaviours has been the building of the relationship between teacher and student. We talk about how the traditional interventions of punishments, rewards and moralising talks fail to address the issues at their core. But through relating to the feelings and needs of all children involved, only then can the teacher have greater influence in affective positive change and helping that child develop healthier strategies.
Both the authoritarian and the permissive approaches neglect to help the children make positive changes for the right reasons. But every situation is different and complex, there are no formulas that work in every situation, but the relationship-based approach needs to form the foundation of exploring the approach that's going to be most effective in any given difficult situation where children are being impacted by physical or verbal aggression.
